


The Unkindness of these Raven Boys

by heartslogos



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2016-05-10
Packaged: 2018-04-26 23:46:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5025382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartslogos/pseuds/heartslogos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Collection of The Raven Cycle fic.</p><p>A group of ravens is sometimes referred to as an unkindness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Gansey’s eyes flick to Ronan and Blue in the back seat – Noah is conspicuously absent and Gansey half suspects that Noah is perhaps just hovering out of sight to watch as things unfold.

Ronan is the picture of lazy comfort, making the back seat of the suburban look like a throne with the spill of his long legs and the rest of his chin on his knuckles as he gazes out the window.

Blue is on the opposite side of the seat, mouth pinched as she stares out _her_ side of the window and Adam offers no help from where he’s sitting next to Gansey in the front, checking things off on their last-minute errand run before they go off to D.C. for another _event_.

Gansey half wishes that he could just send Adam on his own, after all they’re going for Adam, but no. That’s not right, that’s somewhat selfish of him and unfair to Adam and it isn’t as though they’ll be gone _that long_.

A week, at most.

Gansey tries to ignore the fact that the last time he and Adam were gone Ronan almost _died_ and Cabeswater almost was destroyed.

He tries to ignore the fact that it’s Blue _and_ Ronan, now, rather than just Blue and Ronan they’re leaving alone.

“Just. Take care of each other.” Gansey says, for what is most likely the tenth time and probably is judging from the way Blue shoots him a dark look and the extravagant eye roll Ronan gives him. “For me.”

“Yes, _mother_.” Ronan says, sweetness dripping like venom from his mouth as he nudges the back of Gansey’s seat with his foot. “We’ll be _ever_ so good.”

Adam snorts and Gansey shoots him a _look_. Adam shrugs, effectively washing his hands of the entire affair. Gansey feels as though his worry is warranted, especially since Blue is _Blue_ and Ronan is _Ronan_ and Adam should know that. Gansey isn’t overreacting.

“Just – “ Gansey doesn’t know just _what_ , but there are words in his throat that he’s not sure he should say. One, because it could backfire, two, because they could be incredibly embarrassing, and three, because it could be both.

He meets Ronan’s eyes in the rearview mirror and Ronan’s eyes flicker something soft and malleable, before his teeth flash like sparks. Gansey sighs.

“You have every intention of being as horrible as physically possible while I’m gone, don’t you?” At the next stop Gansey twists around to fully look at Ronan, who just hums and flexes his hands. Gansey turns to Blue, “I am so sorry, Jane.”

“I have a dog walking service every Sunday.” Blue throws in, “What’s one more dog to add to that? I won’t even charge you. Much.”

Adam coughs what could be a laugh and if Gansey were the sort to do so, he’d pray for patience. Instead he sighs. “Jane, please.”

Ronan barks from his seat and snaps his teeth at Blue. Blue bares her own teeth back.

“Relax, Gansey. It’s green.” Adam says from the front and Gansey is forced to look away from the flaming car crash that’s about to happen in his own back seat. It isn’t even that Ronan and Blue especially dislike each other – they _don’t_ , Gansey knows because he knows when Ronan dislikes someone and this Ronan isn’t it. This Ronan is a _playing_ Ronan. Almost similar to the Ronan of _before_ , just sharpened to bleeding point. It’s just that Ronan and Blue are so similar. The same sort of hard edged and glittering stuff that sends sparks when struck and starts fires when one isn’t careful. “Let the children play.”

Gansey sighs and this is going to end terribly, he knows. For someone’s property or himself.

“Relax.” Ronan says, kicking Gansey’s seat again. “Maggot and I’ll have a _great_ time.” Ronan snags Blue with an almost indolent stretch of his arm, sliding across the seat and pulling her against his side, arm slung around her shoulder as he bares his teeth in a skull grin. “Won’t we, Maggot?”

Blue’s arm goes around Ronan’s waist and for a moment Gansey has a flash of something on fire and exploding, as she smiles her own snarling grin.

“The best time, Lynch.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Gansey sees Adam give him this _look_. Raised eyebrow that asks him what, exactly, was he thinking, the corner’s of his lips pressing together and pinching in that way that means that Adam wants to laugh but won’t because it’s practically blood in the water.

It’s a look that says that whatever the two do while Adam and Gansey are gone is entirely Gansey’s fault.

Gansey sighs.

“Just don’t get hurt?”

“Promise.”

“Scout’s honor.” Ronan drawls, holding up one hand like he’s swearing an oath.

“Cross my heart and hope to die.” Blue says, crossing herself and Ronan.

“Stick a giant fucking needle in my eye.” The two high five.

“Well, at least Noah won’t be a lonely ghost.” Adam says. “Do you think Blue will turn into a different sort of ghost because she’s part psychic?”

“ _Adam_.”

“ _Gansey_.” Adam says back, in a sort of lilting tone that makes Gansey want to pinch the bridge of his nose.

Blue and Ronan _ooo_ h like middle schoolers in the back seat and Gansey resists the urge to look when he hears movement, Adam does not and lets out a long sigh as if to say _why am I surprised?_

It is sometimes hard to reconcile the fact that Ronan literally pulls things out of dreams, that Adam is a magician, and that Blue is a mirror – that they are all marvelous and amazing when they act like _children_.

“It’s up to me to be the responsible one, this time.” Noah says, startling everyone in the car – Ronan swears and Blue accidentally kicks Adam’s seat, and Adam’s hand flies out to grasp at the door handle. Gansey breathes out a sharp sound. “Don’t worry, I’ll have them in bed by eight every night and they’ll definitely brush their teeth.”

A glance in the rearview mirror reveals that Blue and Ronan have curled into each other, Blue tucked into the curve of Ronan’s chest, hand fisted into his shirt, and one of Ronan’s arms around her as they stare at Noah who’s taken Blue’s vacated seat.

Seatbelts, Gansey idly thinks as Blue and Ronan start in on Noah for the sudden scare. Seatbelts, _please_.

“A little warning, Noah, would be nice.” Gansey says when his heartbeat is something that could be considered reasonable. Perhaps the only reasonable thing in this vehicle.

The three in the backseat have sorted themselves out, Blue comfortably leaning half on Ronan, legs touching and prodding against Noah’s. Ronan has returned to his sprawl, arm thrown out across the back of the seats, and Noah looks particularly pleased with himself.

“You knew I was coming eventually.” Noah points out, which is true. Expect the unexpected, and such. “We should go on a road trip. That way you don’t have to worry about leaving the kids at home.”

“Being locked in a car with the four of you for prolonged periods of time makes me physically sick to think about.” Blue declares. and Ronan grunts as she digs her elbow into his side. Ronan presses a palm against her face and attempts to push her off, but Blue seems all the more intent on digging in. Gansey hasn’t really been privy to their certain brand of affection and developing friendship, but from what he’s gathered it’s based on a very long and intense game of chicken where neither is backing down. Something similar to Russia and the United States during the Cold War, in bodies instead of in countries.

Or perhaps wolves or snakes baiting each other.

There are a plethora of images that come to Gansey’s mind when he thinks of the sort of – _bonding_ the two do and it mostly involves teeth and claw marks.

Adam shudders in his seat, “Agreed.”

“If I’m driving I might not mind it.” Ronan says, to which everyone else except Noah replies -

“ _No_.”

Ronan clicks his tongue and rolls his shoulders, head automatically moving as if he were still carrying Chainsaw.

Gansey is at once struck with how much he loves them all and how much they all terrify him. Ronan and Adam, his wild and magical hands and hearts, his Right and his Left. Ronan, sprawled in the back seat of  his car like a king in the middle of holding court. Adam next to him, relaxed and so completely still like he’s something whole and part and absolutely, wonderfully vital to the very scene. Noah, faded but present and gleaming, a spot of impossibility and improbability that hovers around the edges. And Blue, Blue in the middle of them all, touching and gathering them close and somehow making everything else seem so much brighter. The lean of her against Ronan, like a Queen, the touch of her knee against Noah’s, tying him to them, the line of her body pointing him at Adam, and the electric line of her eyes to his in the rearview mirror.

He can’t imagine ever living without this – leaving it behind. The treasure he’s found in search of the ultimate mystery of Glendower. A gift within the gift of a second life.

The best sort.

Gansey’s eyes meet Adams and he knows without a doubt that Adam is thinking the same, in this moment and Adam gives him a small smile. One of his private, special smiles. The ones he reserves for this. For them. The ones that make Gansey feel warm, like something honey and golden has bloomed and spread in his veins. Gansey would do terrifying things to keep that smile for Adam.

Adam reaches around and snags Blue’s ankle where she was tapping out a beat against the back of his seat, and he turns forward.

“Well. I think Noah’s a good authority to leave them with.” Adam says, “I mean, what’s the worst they can do to him?”

“Ronan threw me out a window, once.”

“Yeah, and you _came back_.”

Gansey sighs.


	2. Chapter 2

Gansey wakes up, or is partially woken by the feeling of weight, tangible presence. Something cold, and then something tangible. He opens his eyes, blurry without glasses or contacts, and looks up, and up, through the half-darkness of the warehouse.

“Ronan?” Gansey says, because the looming can only be Ronan – no one else in the world quite takes up space like Ronan does. And Ronan’s shape is a black cut out among shadows, but somehow Gansey can tell that Ronan is staring at him. His neck, his throat.

He hears a soft fluttering and something – Chainsaw – warm lands on the pillow next to his neck, feathers and a quick heartbeat that he can feels against his skin. Gansey shrugs a little, stretching with limbs heavy and clumsy and slow with sleep.

Chainsaw’s beak nudges against his jaw and Gansey tilts his chin away from her, and Ronan reaches out – and Gansey startles. Ronan stops, hand half-way to Gansey.

“Ronan?” Gansey asks again, because it doesn’t feel like something is wrong. If something were wrong, Ronan would have woken him up immediately. Said something, by now. Or at least, Gansey hopes he would rather than just stare at him.

The tip of Ronan’s finger is rough and blunt when he closes the gap between finger and skin, pressing on the underside of Gansey’s chin – Gansey closes his eyes. Ronan’s finger is hot with the leftover heat of creation. Ronan’s blunt fingernail traces the soft and delicate skin of the underside of his jaw, feeling, searching for something.

Gansey remembers.

“Ronan.” Gansey repeats, and Ronan presses his finger to the place the nightmare’s hook pierced him. He makes a rough noise and when Gansey opens his eyes Ronan is closer. He can pick out the half-lines of Ronan’s face in the darkness.

The cold makes Gansey shiver and Ronan makes another noise, irritation this time and Chainsaw’s wing grazes Gansey’s ear.

“Not now, Noah.” Ronan says and Gansey is startled when the cold abruptly disappears. Ronan yanks at the blankets kicked to the foot of the bed and throws them over Gansey’s legs.

Gansey is struck with the opposites of the two. Ronan, made real out of something not – made tangible and alive by something that was once intangible and never quite living. Noah, a real thing made into something not – destroyed by the living and physical to become something ephemeral and ungraspable. Ronan and the heat of the creation of a universe, Ronan and the hot and heavy beat of his heart. Noah and the cold of the loss of possibilities, Noah and the frozen stillness of time itself. Ronan who pours out heat and life and is breeding ground for every dream and every possibility and every chance. Noah who sucks it all in, traps it into something forgotten, missed, and futile. The giving hand. The taking hand.

Noah’s voice whispers, “Sorry.”

“It’s alright.” Gansey says and he feels a weight settle on the blankets, not as cold.

Ronan watches them. It is not – it’s not quite human the way Ronan watches them. Something frighteningly still, something statuesque. Something predator and avian. Ronan’s finger presses a little harder against Gansey’s chin before falling away.

“It’s alright.” Gansey says, again. The words feeling more solid in his mouth with repetition. He tries to wave away the fog of sleep that fills his head, his ears, his mouth with fog and buzzing cotton.

Ronan grunts and turns away. He disappears from view, but Chainsaw remains, which means that he’s still there somewhere.

“I know.” Ronan says, and Gansey slowly reaches an arm over the edge of the bed, and feels his fingertips graze against the hot, hot skin of Ronan’s neck. Gansey’s fingertips press against the bone, there, and he closes his eyes.

A hundred thousand words to be shared, here. That have been shared here. Like this. In the dark when Gansey is too fogged and muddled up to say them, when Ronan feels safe and secure enough to say them _because_ of that. A hundred thousand words that aren’t shared here. A hundred thousand moments like this, that Gansey wouldn’t give up for anything.

Moments like this that came before Noah. Before Adam. Before Blue. Before Kavinsky and Cabeswater had a name, before Graywarens and Greenmantle. Before all of it.

Gansey wants to ask – will you give this to them, as well? Or will you give them the pieces of you that you will never show me? Is this for us?

Ronan hums and Chainsaw is a heartbeat against his pulse.

Gansey sleeps. Ronan watches.


	3. Chapter 3

Sometimes Blue thinks about the world she has been offered, given, and the world she _wants_. The boys, her boys, have given her so much of the world.  
  
Gansey, who opens doors wherever he sets foot, who's horizon never ends. Noah who gives glimpses of something no one will ever see, not for years, but _promises_. Adam and the many, many tricks of light to his face, who uncovers secrets like earthworms underneath rocks. And Ronan. Ronan who brings new worlds into existence.  
  
But they don't understand, none of them exam, perhaps, Adam. The desperate and hungry need to get out. To leave, to escape. To _be_ something. To _find_ something. To find yourself out there. Not _here_.  
  
Sometimes, when she talks about leaving, Ronan will look at her - baffled and confused, like she's said something like "The sky is green" or "Water is poisonous" or even "Chainsaw is not a bird", and he says in a voice that's sharp like battery acid, "Why would you want to leave?"  
  
Blue used to be offended by that. By him, when he said that. She used to think -  
  
I don't have to stay _here_. I don't have to stay here forever. Just because I was born here, Ronan Lynch, does not make me the same as the rest of them. I can get out of this.  
  
But over time, Blue thinks that he actually is honestly surprised and confused by this. _Leaving_.  
  
Adam tells her once, as he thumbs the edge of a textbook -  
  
"I think it's because he's half a dream."  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"Have you watched him when we go to the Barns? To Cabeswater? It's like he's a dream, too. He changes." Adam frowns. "It's not the same as with Mathew or Aurora. He's not actually something out of a dream like they are. But part of him was, once. It's like he comes - I don't know. I just becomes - _different_."  
  
Blue thinks of the way Aurora falls, like a puppet with cut strings out of Cabeswater and she can't imagine Ronan ever being like that. Just - turning off.  
  
"It's not that he's more alive." Adam says, frustrated as he tries to find the words.  
  
"Ronan is too alive to start with." Blue says, half-joking, but not really. Ronan is present in ways Blue doesn't think any of them can understand. He lives on his knife-edge of adrenaline and crashes, and somehow he's found peace there, with the danger. With the edge. Made it his, part of him. Ronan is only ever truly Ronan - whatever the hell that means - when he's in the middle of doing something he's deemed dangerous.  
  
"He becomes less alive at the Barns, at Cabeswater." Adam says, tasting the words, slowly, carefully. Like he's putting together a puzzle made of sharp glass. Like he's putting together Ronan. "Washed out. Like Noah."  
  
Blue cannot imagine Ronan ever being like Noah, forgettable, miss-able, overlooked Noah. To hear Ronan's name is to experience him. Ronan is an experience, not a person, not a name. He is a _happening_. He _happens_ to you. Like Gansey washes over you, Ronan razes through you. Forces of nature.  
  
"I don't know what you mean." Blue says.  
  
Adam lets out a frustrated sigh. "Just. Watch him. When we go."  
  
"I do watch him." I watch _all_ of you. All the time. "He looks the same."  
  
"Not him." Adam says, voice going lower. A whisper. A secret. "Watch _Gansey_ watching him."  
  
Blue stares at Adam, confused and Adam shakes his head.  
  
"Just watch him."  
  
And Blue did.  
  
Gansey looked at the Ronan of Cabeswater, the Ronan of the Barns the same way Ronan looks whenever he looks at his Mother or Mathew.  
  
As if he is seeing the dead given back to him. The world returned.

It’s heartbreaking, sometimes. All the time. To watch Gansey watch Ronan.

(To watch Gansey watch Adam, to watch Gansey watch Noah. To watch Adam watch Gansey. To watch Adam watch Ronan. And Ronan when he watches them back. All different sorts of longing. She sometimes wonders if they watch her that way -

Yes, Noah tells her, a gentle wind in her ear when she looks away from the tangle of their watching. They watch you, but they don’t want you to see. But they watch you, too.)

When Gansey watches Ronan at Cabeswater and the Barns, Gansey looks like he sees ghosts come back to haunt and tease him for what he’s lost. In love and in pain. Ronan is gentler, in those places. And something about his living edge is dulled. Wrapped up and away. He’s less sharp. The edges of him bleed into the rest of the dreams, like they could blink and he would _be_ the dream rather than the dreamer. And Blue thinks she understands, just a little, of what Adam means.  
  
Henrietta, Cabeswater, the Barns. They are Ronan's home. He will never leave them. He's bound to them, like Aurora and Mathew. He could never understand. Ronan makes himself anew and finds the world in every step. When Ronan wants the world, _it_ comes to _him_. He does not go to it.  
  
So he does not understand their thirst.  
  
And neither does Gansey.  
  
Gansey has spent his entire life in the world, searching for this. For them. For this place. The world is nothing to Gansey. _This_ is. This has become his world. His search, his quest.  
  
He would not leave it.

Henrietta and the ley line – they are now home for him. Gansey has shrunk the world to fit into a handful of words and the world has willingly shrunk itself for Gansey. Everything that could ever be important is here.

This, this place, is more real to Gansey than anything else in the world and sometimes Blue thinks that’s a wonderful thing. That someone can find something so beautiful in this small little southern town, but it’s also frustrating. Because there are waterfalls and monuments and pyramids and forests and lakes and mountains and deserts out in that world that are all sorts of wonderful magic all on their own and Gansey – Gansey just wants to be here.

It’s not that this place is home for Gansey the way it’s _home_ for Ronan. It’s the end of his journey – and Blue does her best not to think about how it’s just _the end._ Gansey is like Odysseus or Prospero winding down at the end of their journey away and about to lose it all. If only they could search for Glendower forever, Blue thinks. Forever and ever. If only they could stay this way without end.

All good things have to end, but does Gansey?

In their quest for one king they’re going to lose another.

Gansey doesn’t understand leaving, he leaves – he had a life before Henrietta, before them, before he became a raven boy – but leaving is a distraction from his living. Gansey lives here, with them. He pretends out there, with others.

That wouldn’t stop him, though, Blue knows. Because just like how Ronan gives them his dreams, Gansey would give them the world. He tries to. But he doesn’t understand.

Blue – and Adam – doesn’t want the world because someone gave it to them. They want to go _to_ the world. They want to get into it, let it wash through them. They want to experience it and all of the changes and struggles and hardships, just like living. They want to live the world.

It’s not living if it’s given.

Gansey and Ronan don’t understand that. They might never understand that.

Blue wants to leave – and she wants to stay, hell she wants to stay with them, but this is something that’s hers, getting away. Going. Henrietta and Cabeswater and the ley line might be something that calls her home, something to come back to, but it isn’t her world. She refuses to let it be her world.

Adam looks at her with eyes full of knowing and it feels like breathing when she looks back. It’s not about places, not really. It’s about change. It’s about growing outwards. It’s about proving that you aren’t what the world thinks you have to be.

It’s about Blue not always just being the psychic’s daughter in this podunk town. It’s about Adam not always being the trailer park. It’s about them not always being the dirt and roots.

It’s not about Henrietta or Alignoby or anyone. It’s about Blue. It’s about Adam. It’s about them and the world and everything they can get their own hands on. Nails and grit and sweat. It’s a finding. Not a giving.


	4. Chapter 4

It's Ronan's hands, more than anything else, that get Adam.  
  
They are not the first thing he notices about Ronan - no. Ronan can't be examined or witnessed, first, in pieces. Ronan hits you, completely or not at all. His eyes, his face, his voice, the sheer physical presence of his name and the fullness of it in your mouth, all of it hits you at once. Over and over again, like the full burning force of the sun to someone who's been inside or in the dark.  
  
It's when you get used to Ronan - when you know how to brace yourself just right for it without closing your eyes, that you can then take Ronan in flashes.  
  
And it is Ronan's hands, more than anything else, that get and _hold_ Adam.  
  
Ronan is expressive, in the matters he chooses to be. And if Ronan is truly the snake - the dog - people like to call him, well. Then his hands are the rattle, the tail. Ronan's face is the flared hood and the bared fangs, the snarling teeth and the moving ears. But his hands.  
  
His _hands_.  
  
The first time Ronan touches him - a pass of his palm over Adam's bare shoulder their first summer as friends - maybe not quite friends to each other, yet, but Gansey's friends, _Gansey's_ , yes - Adam remembers the feel of callouses, and it startles him because he cannot imagine Ronan doing anything that would wear his hands aside from his natural and seemingly synonymous _violence_.  
  
As if Ronan were violence bred into the body of a boy.  
  
Adam knows better, now.  
  
Farms, even dream farms, are run by hands, bodies.  
  
Ronan's hands. Lynch hands.  
  
It is more than the callouses that betray that Ronan comes from dirt like and so very different from Adam. Different types of soil - fertile and salted earth. Soft and gentle loam, rough and sharp gravel.  
  
Ronan's hands are made for art: long and fine boned, calloused, the skin over his knuckles shiny smooth with scars and mottled bruises from the violence he carries everywhere like his ID card.  
  
From what Gansey has told him, from the intrusive glimpses he's stolen at the Barns, he knows Ronan - the Lynches - come straight out of dreams and fairy tales. Sons of dreams. Music of all kinds - piano, violin, drums, guitars, their own mouths, the tap of their feet - comes with them.  
  
And the way Ronan holds Chainsaw - a memory, the mouse in the barn, Ronan's eyes half closed and not looking at anything, not hating and daring and challenging and spiting anything, not now, not like this, his mouth no longer a jagged cut on his own face but a half-healed scar, open like a breathing kiss, the sharp plane of his cheek becomes simply a cheek as he holds the mouse in his long art hands. The way Ronan crafts in dreams - shapes things. The way Ronan holds the puzzle box and quickly, elegantly, flicks every letter into place like he's playing the world's most beautiful instrument.  
  
It takes artistry to do these things.  
  
And this is what captures Adam because Ronan is all of these things. The _Art_.  
  
But somehow, somewhere, Ronan put that down and chose a different art.  
  
The art of _war_.  
  
Ronan is a war in a boy and Adam doesn't know how Ronan can win it all the time. Maybe he doesn't. Adam remembers the white scales and feathers, the watery eyes and the innumerable beaks that, like Ronan, can't be looked at directly. The force of the image hurts the mind, too much at once. Impossible. Like looking at an angel. Or God - he figures.  
  
In the stories, that never went well.  
  
Adam knows war because there's a war inside of _him,_ too. The enemies are different, now. _He_ , is different now. But the war continues and he doesn't know where the lines are drawn in Ronan, but he knows the war is in him.  
  
And it's outside of him, too.  
  
Those hands - those farmers hands that make music and hold life in his palms - those are the same hands that have skin busted open over knuckles and fine, fine fractures. The same hands that curl around the leather wheel of a car and steer it into almost crashes of fire and gasoline and steel. The same hands that are equally at home as fists and choose to hold knives and liquor bottle necks.  
  
It's not just a Ronan thing, it might be a Lynch thing.  
  
Adam has, in fact, met Declan.  
  
What does that make Mathew?  
  
It is sad.  
  
Because Adam _knows_ , now - now that he can take Ronan in pieces at his leisure, now that Ronan allows him to see in pieces rather the impossible and incomprehensible whole - that Ronan is so much more than the rattle, the hood, the fang, the claw.  
  
Snakes were once healers, prophets and magicians, the revealers of knowledge, the guides, the guardians.  
  
Ronan was once farm and music and crafts and heartbeats.  
  
Ronan, now, is gasoline and shining, burning, chrome - police sirens, flinches, and undisguised rumors.  
  
It riles something in him - he doesn't know, maybe it's something Cabeswater, but maybe it's just something all him - when people's eyes skip over Ronan and move to address Gansey or himself, referring to Ronan as dog, snake, pet, adjunct. As if Gansey and Adam were his keepers, and Ronan the third, ignorant creature in the room who doesn't know its being talked about.  
  
Ronan is not for you, Adam will sometimes think. He is not for _any_ of you to even _consider_.  
  
Vines, something proprietary curl up in him, around the name _Ronan_ in his mouth, and his hands curl into fists because he too is from dirt, if not soil. Adam, like Ronan, knows bodies, fists. War.  
  
It's going to be their fault if the snake strikes, you do not poke the serpent in the grass with a stick and expect nothing in response.  
  
Ronan is not always a serpent, though. At least, he is not always one ready to strike. Sometimes he is a boy.  
  
In Cabeswater, Adam can watch Ronan put away the art of war, to simply become the art.  
  
The of war part belongs elsewhere, outside.  
  
Not even Ronan can fight indefinitely.  
  
Adam sometimes wonders why Ronan does not become the Ronan of art and soil and heartbeats at the Barns.  
  
Ronan at the Barns is not Adam's Ronan. Perhaps he's _Gansey's_ , Ronan, there. He is a Ronan that Adam never knew, doesn't know if he _wants_ to know. A dreamed Ronan. Improbable and soft, fresh sprouts and tender felt-lined leaves, Ronan. _The world after rain_ Ronan. Painful to watch, Ronan. A stranger. Adam can understand the appeal - to understand the mystery of the unknowable Ronan Lynch.  
  
But Adam, too, is unknowable. There are parts he does not want _anyone_ to know.  
  
Adam much prefers _the world after Ronan_ , Ronan.  
  
A Ronan who is half soil and shoots and heartbeats and rain, and half gasoline and roaring, alcohol and leather and teeth.  
  
The Ronan who holds both art and war at once, though he lowers one to raise the other.  
  
That is the Ronan at Cabeswater, the snake half curled but not ready to strike. Hood lowered. Fangs hidden. Silent.  
  
Watching.  
  
And Ronan's hands -  
  
His hands are not fists, they aren't cups. They simply _are_. He lifts a hand to catch a pale pink blossom that Blue and Noah call down, and he rubs the petals between his fingertips. Ronan's knuckle runs up and down Chainsaw's breast, his mouth curled with fondness and something bitter-sharp as he croons affection at her in his own barbed wire way.  
  
And Chainsaw, like her maker, responds in kind with sharp, piercing sounds and the tips of her claws dig into Ronan's shoulder. Faint, pink lines.  
  
Adam watches and Ronan looks at him. Ronan stretches out his hand, his arm, and Adam half lifts his.  
  
Chainsaw takes flight - a heavy weight that reminds him of life, heartbeats, and improbably but possible things - that lands on Adam's bare skin, her wings half spread for balance. Her claws are like eyelashes on his skin - not touching. Brushing. Gentle.  
  
She looks at him and makes a soft, _soft_ sound, before taking off, the tip of her wing just barely creating wind by his hearing ear. He lets out a breath and Ronan's lips flicker towards something raw and flesh-like, something _boy_ rather than something walking war-zone.  
  
Adam feels his own mouth attempt to mimic the action, something warm spreading like ferns and violets in the palms of his own hands. Something he hopes Ronan watches.  
  
Not even Adam can fight indefinitely.


	5. Chapter 5

“Worship of symbols and substitute objects is considered idolatry.”

Gansey glances up and Ronan’s book covers his face, spread out over his tilted back head like he’s going to learn it via osmosis. Gansey wonders if Ronan knows his thoughts. Ronan knows the unknowable, at times. He’s half tempted to ask Ronan to decode them for him, Ronan and his languages. As if he alone escaped the curse of Babel.

“Am I being obvious?” Gansey asks, instead, because he didn’t think he was talking out loud or otherwise letting his thoughts out.

Ronan snorts, and the book slides off his face, and down, down, into his lap and onto the floor as Ronan rolls his neck to look at him.

Ronan stretches his finger and presses it to Gansey’s thumb, against his lip.

“This.” Ronan says. Gansey can almost taste the salt of his skin, via the proxy of his own finger. An indirect kiss?

Gansey sighs against their fingers, and Ronan drops his hand, the back of it landing on Gansey’s knee before slowly retreating – like a serpent – to Ronan’s side.

Ronan watches _everyone_.

Gansey often forgets this. It is easy to forget that Ronan is perhaps the most aware, awake, alert of them all – for all that his powers lie within the realm of dreams. Perhaps it is _because_ of this that Ronan is so aware? Perhaps dreaming requires some sort of attention to detail, some sort of sharpened awareness -

Ronan’s fingers snap in front of his face.

“Dick the third.” Ronan says, slight impatience, something Gansey labels as _fondness_ for the lack of any other word that translates well enough into _Ronan_ , curled in his voice. A serpent in sunshine. “What did I just say about idolatry? It’s a sin, you know.”

Gansey just _looks_ at Ronan, because Ronan fully well knows Gansey’s opinion on religion – or rather, lack thereof.

Ronan stretches out his long, long legs, arms flung to the sides – a cross of a boy.

Gansey rubs his eyes underneath his glasses, the frames knocking against his knuckles and forehead. Another sleepless night. Gansey wonders how Ronan ever wakes up, sometimes, let alone stays awake.

“Isn’t that more your sin than mine?” Gansey eventually says. Ronan watches everyone, but Gansey watches Ronan – more than he watches anyone else.

Ronan, Gansey feel-think- _knows_ in his very bones, like he knows he died, like he knows he must find Glendower, like he knows he is connected to Blue, is his. Part and separate from him.

Adam has Cabeswater, and from what Gansey from gather from his descriptions – if that’s what Adam has, then Gansey has Ronan.

A voice in his head, a presence like gravity that he has to carefully parse and parcel. Remind and fence off, release and unleash, hold back and guide. Listen and be advised by. A presence that creeps in his vision and pokes and prods and sighs and wants.

Ronan frowns, a sharp downturn of his mouth and the thing neither of them have been willing to speak about rears its head.

A sleeping dog that’s heard its name being called.

Ronan’s teeth are suggestions behind his lips.

Gansey meets the suggestion head on because if Ronan won’t say anything, then Gansey must. Such is the nature of the beast that, combined, they make.

Ronan looks away first, teeth becoming more than simple suggestions when he bares them, digging his teeth into the leather at his wrist. Gnawing and pulling, tugging as he focuses at some point past his feet and into the Henrietta simulacrum.

 _Why Adam_ , Gansey could ask, here. Also _are you sure you know what you’re going into?_

Another question – _Do you know that he knows?_

Adam, he too, watches. Not as much as Ronan. But close. How do you not watch the sun?

Gansey waits as the tension in Ronan builds. Teeth no longer enough to release his simmering and prickling irritation. His toes curl, and his hands fist, he draws his knees up and he looks something serpent, something hound. And something simply _other_ , bigger than skin and bone, something that verges on the incomprehensibility of dreams and the infinity of the mind. Something that whispers about gods and saints and angels, creatures of scales and beaks.

It builds and builds until it’s a vibration underneath Ronan’s skin and Gansey watches because this is where Ronan could easily turn it back on him – _why Blue, why now, did you ever think about Adam?_

They are the same beast.

So Gansey breathes and says, instead -

“Dream him the world.”

Ronan looks at him, leather trapped between teeth. Ronan looks at him for a long, long time. Long enough that Gansey becomes dimly aware of the way the shadows deepen.

Gansey waits, open and clear as he can. Ronan has always read him best.

And then Ronan is no longer unknowable god and dream and hound and serpent. Now, Ronan is a boy. Angry, uncomfortable at being angry, and angry at being uncomfortable.

“He doesn’t  _want_ one.” Ronan mutters around leather, spitting them out in favor of gnawing at the bone of his wrist itself. “And he doesn’t _need_ one. Shut up.”

The anger is not at Gansey, so much as it is generalized anger at the world at large. Perhaps a little bit of it is at Gansey for bringing it up.

Gansey in truth has not even scratched the surface. Gansey will wait for that one.

Ronan knows.

Ronan runs a hand over the back of his head, face turning away as he digs his nails into the back of his neck. Gansey stretches out a leg and nudges Ronan’s knee with the heel of his foot. Ronan grunts.

“Ronan.” Gansey says. Every question and suggestion packed into the sound of his name.

Ronan sighs, shoulders slumping.

“I’m not ready, alright?” Ronan says, eyes lifting to meet Gansey’s.

For what?

Gansey closes his eyes again and a moment later feels Ronan’s finger press against his lip, palm brushing his knuckles where he was about to bring up his own hand.

“I’m not ready.” Ronan repeats, quiet and firm. “Don’t tell him.”

He already knows, Ronan, Gansey thinks, but nods his head. The slightest amount that makes the kiss of finger and lip direct. Gansey sighs and Ronan withdraws his hand, and replaces it with his head on Gansey’s shoulder. Warm and bristly. The curve of Ronan’s body presses against his side and Gansey listens, eyes closed as Ronan slips into light sleep.

(He already knows, Ronan. And he wouldn’t say _no_. Not to you. You watch him all the time, how do you not see?  _Adam wants you._ If you would simply offer.Adam would accept _you._ )

“Have you gone to dream me the world?” Gansey asks, voice soft as he reaches over to snag at the leather, damp, on Ronan’s wrist. Ronan’s fingers curl, ferns and flowers, snakes and birds.

“A new one for every night.” Ronan confirms, promises. Gansey leans his head on Ronan’s and opens his eyes.


	6. Stocking Stuffers 2015 [1]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stocking Stuffers! "We make the decisions you cannot. "We make the sacrifices you will not" Timothy Drake and/or Adam Parrish

“He was dying. And it hurt him.” Adam says, and there are things beyond dignity and ethics, beyond forgiveness and beyond justice. There are things that boil down to  _I love him,_  and  _I understand_.

Things that whittle down to  _It had to be done_.

“You killed him.” Noah whispers. There’s no accusation, no hurt, no betrayal in his voice. It’s not like with -

Adam doesn’t close his eyes because closing your eyes to something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist anymore. That it didn’t happen.

It happened. Adam made it happen. It has happened.

Cabeswater is smooth and whole. Cabeswater is a mirror of peace. Stability.

Gansey is dead, the world continues.

“He was dying. So you killed him. Because that’s what he wanted, and you were the only one who could do to it for him. The Magician.” Noah says.

Death is just another way of life. 

Adam breathes, Gansey does not. Something in him feels hollow, like the slightest breeze is going to rattle it loose and it will fall and start an avalanche. An avalanche that’s already slammed into Blue and Ronan full force.

“You can survive an avalanche.” Noah points out. “If you have the right tools.”

Blue and Ronan are nothing but walking tools of war and fire. The cold can’t reach them. Not like it does Adam. Not like it does to Adam all the time.

“You did it so Ronan wouldn’t have to.” Noah is cold against his side, and his hand is see through when he puts it over Adam’s. A pale imitation of comfort. The intent is welcome, all the same. “Ronan knows that on the inside.”

Ronan is a storm of pain in a boy made of dreams. Ronan is the sum of every survived nightmare.

(Adam pries Ronan’s hand open, and fistfuls upon fistfuls of crushed gold and black, still faintly twitching, fall from his hands. Ronan’s face is marble. An angel trapped, a devil waiting to be released.

“I can’t.” Ronan says.  _I can’t lose him_.

“You won’t.” Adam lies. Ronan allows it. Ronan allows Adam to do a lot of things. “You won’t.”)

“They can’t leave you.” Noah says. “As much as they’re hurt by you, they love you. It’s a knot. All of us. Together. Even Gansey.”

Adam’s heart kicks in his chest. A soft scuff of a kick.

A knot burned closed.


	7. Stocking Stuffers 2015 [2]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stocking Stuffers: Ronan Lynch - "Two can keep a secret." (And a happy Christmas to you too, Miss Hearts!)

A secret, by definition, is something not meant to be known or seen by others. A secret cannot be  _shared_.

Ronan, by definition, destroys definition. A paradox. A dream that walks and dreams and thinks and shits and fucks and swears and dies a thousand times over to produce one single epipen to rescue a king from a swarm that was never there. A secret that flaunts itself with every sweep of his eyelashes and sharp turn of his head and twisting snarl of his mouth.

Adam knows secrets, he has plenty of his own. Adam figures that everyone has secrets. 

Ronan  _is_  a secret, in onto himself. Adam thinks that there are secrets to Ronan Lynch that Ronan, himself, has not yet discovered. Or perhaps they are buried by him.

Ronan flaunts most of his secrets, though.

Adam sometimes wants to touch one of the most obvious ones; his knuckle across the sharp plane of Ronan’s face as he sleeps; the grease-stained thumb to the slightly parted lip; a bridge made between irises, his and Adam’s; the slow, careful, growing, tangle of fingers standing side by side; leaning into the touches in the early Sunday mornings as church bells ring;  _Stay_.

There is power in knowing, and there is power in silence.

As powerful and invigorating as it is to be the unknown and unknowable, Adam also savors  _knowing_  and being  _known_.

 _Am I your secret, Ronan_? Adam wants to ask to the soft, pink-with-cold shell of Ronan’s ear as the stubbornly slouches himself down in the backseat of Gansey’s car, loud enough to be heard over the Pig’s engine, Blue and Gansey in front oblivious and uknowing to the waking secret behind their backs.

Ronan’s eyes flick to him like he  _knows_  and Adam inches the tips of his fingers across the space between them, and does not look away.

The challenge and hesitation in Ronan’s stare seem to build a physical bridge between them and Adam uses it to slowly turn his hand up, fingers spread and loose.

Ronan looks away, a sharp movement that reminds Adam of Chainsaw when Blue says something about snakes and Calla.

Gansey makes a hard turn and Adam slides a bit over the seat towards Ronan. Gansey apologizes, quickly looking back before looking forward again when Adam waves him off.

Ronan’s fingers are just as solid and warm as Adam would think a walking paradox’s would be.


	8. Chapter 8

Ronan did not need Aglionby. Nor, did Aglionby need Ronan. This, if nothing else, they agreed on.

They fought. They clashed. They collided. They warred. There were casualties suffered on both sides; losses and victories and strategic retreats. A victor would have soon been evident, had no one intervened.

Gansey intervened by voicing his disapproval at the entire affair with a single disappointed thumb to his lip. And of course, as expected, Gansey won.

Ronan did not need Aglionby, nor did Aglionby need Ronan. However, Gansey _wanted_ them both.

So Ronan bitterly endured the indignity of Aglionby’s uniform blazer and tie. Aglionby, in turn, angrily ignored Ronan not wearing said uniform uniformly.

That is not to say that either suffered each other silently. Adam would rather say that the two vocally and routinely voiced their displeasure at being forced to tolerate each other’s prolonged existence to Gansey and anyone else who would listen like volcanoes letting out steam.

And depending on how Ronan and Gansey were at that very moment it could go over well or it could not go over at all.

The problem with Gansey and Ronan, Adam muses, was that they were too _much_. They were always hot and cold and swinging wildly between the two of them. On average Adam has calculated that their temperatures tend to synch into each other, in that uncanny way they seem to have since the very beginning.

But when one of them swings too far _hot_ and the other too far _cold_ , or worse, _hot and hot_ and _cold and cold_ , it turns disastrous.

On one of the many occasions where Gansey and Ronan fought over Ronan’s mutual war with Aglionby, Gansey had – exasperated – snapped, “Ronan, what about your parents? This couldn’t have possibly what they would have wanted for you. They _enrolled you here in the first place_.”

Ronan had snarled half a laugh, “My father didn’t want anything from anything he didn’t dream up himself.”

And then Ronan’s voice turned sharp. “He didn’t _trust_ anything he didn’t dream up himself.”

Gansey then – as Adam and the vanishing Noah did in the back seat of the Pig – recoiled, and like a true King, regrouped. and continued on boldly.

“And your mother?”

Ronan’s voice turned brittle with violence.

“My _mother_ didn’t want anything my _father_ didn’t want her to want.”

The conversation – the war of a conversation – sputtered out and they drove on in bitter and poisonous silence. This, at least, had been familiar territory to Adam. Silence of any sort was easier than explosive arguing.

That, Adam thinks, was an occasion of the both of them running _cold_.

It’s easier when they’re closer to the middle. It would probably be easier if there were someone else around who ran in the middle. Counter balance.

That person is not Adam. Adam runs _hot, hot, hot, hot, hot_ all the time.

Hot with shame. Hot with humiliation. Hot with hunger. Hot with ambition. Hot with dreams. Hot with envy. Hot with hunger. Hot with determination. Hot with running. Hot, hot, hot, hot, hot.

So hot it can be _numbing_.

Gansey had once told Adam that Ronan wasn’t always like this – Ronan of _before_ had been mercurial. Playful. Sparking but never a flame. Ronan, of before, _listened_.

The Ronan of before, according to Gansey, _obeyed_.

Who? Adam had asked, confused with the concept of Ronan obeying anything or anyone. Ronan barely obeys the laws of nature.

To be perfectly honest, Adam is still confused about the concept of _Ronan_.

 _His father, Niall._ Gansey answered.

Adam tried to imagine Niall Lynch, father of Ronan, father of a dream turned dreamer.

If Ronan was a maker of monsters and dreams, keeper of secrets and futures, what did that make his father?

Niall Lynch, tamer of Ronan the maker of dreams. _No_ , Adam’s mind – not Adam – had calmly rejected the idea and laid out the proof to the rest of him like laying out a round of solitaire. _Ronan is not a tameable thing._

Even Gansey, King among men, Commander of Magicians, Demander of Miracles, could not tame Ronan lynch.

Ronan could be convinced to listen to Gansey, he could follow Gansey of his own free will, and he could even be guilted or coerced into doing what Gansey wanted.

But Ronan does not _obey_ Gansey, or anyone else.

Dreams are not commanded, only made. And Ronan has already been made, raw and unchangeable to anyone but his own two hands.

The bell rings, and underneath the sound of it, Ronan lynch snarls his way into the room and slams himself into the desk next to Adam’s. Adam watches out of the corner of his eye as Ronan stubbornly fixes his gaze on the window and the blue Henrietta sky that lies just beyond it, the classroom deemed unworthy of his attention.

Adam, these days, doesn’t have the heart to even blame him.

Adam needs Aglionby and it’s small little ecosystem of Henry Chengs and Tad Carruthers and Skips and Tigers and Champs. Gansey doesn’t need it, not like Adam does, but he wants it and is in turn wanted by it.

Ronan neither wants nor needs it and the only reason that he’s here is because there are a few things that he’s deemed worthy of his time and attention, and those few things happen to be in the exact same geographic location as Aglionby’s existence.

Five minutes into lecture, Ronan’s leg stretches across the space between desks and knocks against Adam’s desk leg.

Adam does not react, but he feels a slight pull at the corner of his lip.

It has not escaped Adam or Gansey or Aglionby’s attention that the greatest chance for Ronan appearing and staying happens when Adam is present.

 _He is worthy_.

Ronan is up, body slicing through the air of the room, the instant the second hand on the clock hits twelve – even before the bell rings. Ronan’s hand slams into the wood door as the bell sounds and Adam gets up at a more sedate pace.

Ronan is lounging by Adam’s locker when Adam makes his way out of the classroom, five minutes later after asking the teacher about the exact details of their reading assignment – how long? How much focus exactly do you want on the characters? What if I answer the question using a different example? What if I disagree with the question, am I allowed to propose a counter argument? – baring his teeth at anyone passing too close and laughing with his eyes at the freshmen who flinch and scurry away like packs of mice.

“You’re supposed to be setting an example for them.” Adam says.

Ronan raises an eyebrow. “I’m teaching them not to bite off more than they can fucking chew.”

Adam snorts and reaches into his locker and Ronan’s fingers curl around the edge of the metal door.

“You have vocational next period.” Ronan says – one of the few classes that neither Adam nor Gansey have with him, but also, strangely, one of the only classes that despite Ronan’s spotty attendance is not actually taking much of a hit - “Let’s get out of here.”

 _Vocational_ is a weirdly amusing term that Aglionby has applied to a series of classes that last only one quarter each that are supposedly meant to teach students life skills. Adam is currently taking his turn in woodshop and it is one of the few classes Adam doesn’t mind missing. The entire grade is based on their weekly check ins and their final project. Weekly check in is Friday.

Adam gives Ronan a _look_.

Ronan snorts, “Relax, Parrish. I’d get you back before midnight and you can return to your shitty classes and your shitty jobs. Unless you really _wanted_ to build that bird house.”

Adam isn’t building a bird house, but he doesn’t bother to say that.

“And you?”

“I have horticulture this quarter.” Ronan barks a laugh, “I’m a fucking farmer, Parrish. There’s nothing they can teach me that I can’t already do. Besides, what am I going to do? Sit there and _stare_ them into growing faster?”

Ronan smirks and snags Adam’s wrist – cool from being inside air conditioned rooms all day.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Adam’s feels hot, hot, _hot, hot, hot_.

A newer, different kind of hot – _want_.

Gansey will no doubt be disappointed in both of them – Adam, mostly. But Adam is not, and has never claimed to be, Ronan’s keeper.

Adam is no Niall or Gansey, tamer or King.

As Ronan always says it – _Magician_.

And magic Adam is beginning to understand – the unfurling of ferns against his skin, the sound of trickling water in his deaf ear, and the smell of dew and grass in his nose - , like dreams, cannot be tamed.


End file.
